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The situation has changed completely in the modern world. We have created meat factories, forcefully torturing millions of animals daily, and have somehow agreed upon what animals to kill and not to kill.
A lion will kill anything that moves (as long as it is not poisonous), are you willing to kill (and eat) any animal under the sky?
What about pets? Do you think they suffer any kind of pain and suffering ? If yes, that's the same way any other animal you eat (regardless of intelligence) feels when being slaughtered.
One more question to think about: A young child (in a modern urban world) will be more comfortable plucking and eating fruits from a tree ? OR killing a pig -> draining blood -> cutting it into pieces -> cooking it to eat it ?
I say this without commenting in favor of either side of this debate which I am undecided on and reading with interest.
But I think it's important not to shy away from the reality that cruelty and the desire to kill are very much a part of human nature from the beginning. And that applies no matter where or how we are brought up.
What you mention is a typical destructive behavior noticed in kids and a tendency of violence/killing which even adults have. Key point here is: will they also eat the bird after killing it? Is the killing done here for the sake of eating ? or for the sake of enjoyment/destruction (whatever other reason).
recently our neighbors slaughtered a goat that my kids had seen alive just before, and we all ate it. we also eat the chicken from the kids grandparents village home that they saw being slaughtered there.
kids killing animals for no reason are an exception, as are kids refusing to eat animals that they saw alive.
if they weren't we'd all have become vegetarians centuries or even millennia ago.
(slightly related: it bothers me that some people think kids should be protected from experiencing how meat is produced. if you eat it, you should know where it came from)
That’s a common self-indulgence. Many predators in fact couldn’t care less if prey is still twitching or whining, as long as it doesn’t run away.
I think if lions regularly bred into existence billions of antelope, confined and tortured them for the entirety of their existence, and then ate them, yes, a lot of people would view that as pretty evil, even while acknowledging such a creature is probably incapable of the moral calculus that (some) humans are.
that's exactly what they do. Lions will remove other predators from their territory and indulge themselves eating as much food as they need.
Unrelatedly, elephants are quite a bit smarter than lions and herbivorous, as are many primates!
Let an average person alone in nature and they’ll starve within a month
Why is the human naked? Does the Orca get pants?
What are we talking about?
lions aren't consciously deciding against a rationally plausible alternative, they are eating what is available.
similarly human cannibalization stories generally center around the concept that the people driven to such actions are given no sensible alternatives (airplane crash in a snow mountain comes to mind) -- so we don't presume they were evil, we presume they were desperate.
lions lack the intelligence and forethought to see the consequences of long term decisions. We as humans have gauged and measured the effects of ranching on our environment, the effects of meat consumption on our physiology, etc.
so, to answer your question : If the lion was able to empathize and relate to the suffering of the prey, if the lion was able to relate its' actions to the destruction of its' environment, if the lion had sensible alternatives that avoided long term consequences while still satiating hunger, if the lion could accurately forecast the future and STILL decide upon the destructive course of action...
...yes, an argument could be made that that lion might be evil.
If nature designed for this, then why do people feel any guilt at all?
Regular hunters != industrial-level slaughtering. There are plenty of "regular hunters" who only eat meat they kill themselves. This is like saying if I cut down a single tree on my property I should also support the clear-cutting of the rainforest.
All that said believing no animals should get slaughtered. If we do it to some, could as well do to many. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42642138 tld: I don’t believe in reducing numbers, because the reduced numbers mean nothing to the animal being slaughtered.
Usually the same ones who argue that we're separate from nature when it's about building motorways and single family homes to park two SUVs, are also the ones explaining that we should be more like lions in a savannah. Seems inconsistent, at best.
Plant based diets are:
- more affordable
- better for the environment
- healthier
- avoid/reduce cruelty (livestock and human)
If you want to eat meat, fine, but the comment you replied to is innocuous and not "guilt-tripping" anyone.
you're saying this typing on a _computer_ - how does that fit into human evolution?
IMO humans evolve in an ethical standpoint as well and tend to want to cause the least amount of suffering possible as we evolve. That is why we have medicine, don't usually own slaves, don't hit children, and don't abuse animals.
That said, you personally don’t add much to this global effing mess that the life is by eating some low mass meat per year. You also don’t subtract much by avoiding it. One predator out-eats you 20-50x easily on meat. And many humans can’t or barely can afford meat.
The ethical problem has systemic and economic roots and doesn’t relate to personal ideology. Being vegan but doing nothing systemic is pretty useless imo. The whole privilege of going vegan bases on living in a society that does all that to animals as a consequence and a requirement of its function.